A playthrough of American Sammy's 1992 Super Nintendo game, Ys III: Wanderers From Ys. Falcom's acclaimed Ys (pronounced "ease") series began life in the late 80s on the Japanese PC88 PC as a "modern" action-RPG. As quaint as the very first entry seems now, it established a number of important conventions, and the series is still running strong today - Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana is nearly four years old now and is still selling well. Wanderers from Ys, however, is something of a proverbial "black sheep" among its flock. Whereas most of the Ys games focus to some extent on exploration, Ys III stripped out the series' standard top-down perspective, (most of the) branching paths, and the bumper-style combat. Like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Ys III replaces the typical ARPG trappings with console-style platforming mechanics. You still gain experience, upgrade your equipment, and go on quests, but this time the experience far better resembles Faxanadu and The Battle of Olympus than it does The Legend of Zelda or Soul Blazer. Ys III wasn't regarded as highly as the other games in the series (at least, not until it was remade as The Oath in Felghana), but I've always thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a remarkably short and simple game (even for 1989), but it has enough personality and general "weirdness" to keep it fun throughout. The TurboGrafx-CD and Genesis versions were among the first to be made available in English in 1991, while the SNES port appeared shortly thereafter in January of 1992. Unfortunately, the SNES version of the game is the weakest 16-bit era console ports. The graphics and sound both suffered a major downgrade in the shift to the SNES. While the scrolling is smoother than that in the Turbo game, several background details are missing, and the game's color selections are drab and murky. The music quality has also done a less-than-graceful swandive into the concrete: the composition is as fantastic as it is anywhere else, but the samples are terrible. (Enough so that I recently actually went back and remade two of tracks for the SNES hardware! You can hear them here if you like: and The difficulty level was also ramped up significantly in this port. Adol's downward sword thrust has been weakened, and his sword no longer does damage for the entire time it makes contact with an enemy - it now instead registers as a "fixed hit," and it makes Adol far more prone to taking huge amounts of contact damage. As long as you don't mind the significantly higher difficulty level, it plays nearly as well as its TurboGrafx CD and Sega Genesis counterparts, which is by far the most important measure of its quality. I get that a lot of people are nostalgic for this one, and because of that, they'll endlessly defend it and argue that it's the best one. I can't agree there. It is a good game, but the SNES port finishes in a distant third-place when put up against the incredible Turbo CD and Genesis games. If you're interested in seeing the game on another platform, here are a couple of links: TurboGrafx-CD version: Genesis version: And this is the original Ys game on the Master System: *This video is a new recording to replace my original 480i upload. It does not cut out any grinding for levels - many people expressed a want to see an unedited playthrough, so here you go! Feel free to skip the grinding if you don't want to see it. No one will hold it against you ;) ____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete ( punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
